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Ammonia not going down!

3K views 13 replies 9 participants last post by  guitarherowanab 
#1 · (Edited)
Hey guys, this is my first post so hopefully someone can help me out! (New to salt water, but I have experience with fresh)

I have a 14g bio cube which I want to have corals in eventually. The tank is almost 3 months old, it took a month to cycle and has around 16 pounds of live rock, 20 pounds of live sand, bio balls, and a protein skimmer.

I added 5 blue legged hermits after the month and two weeks later with 0 ammonia, 0 nitrite, and 10 nitrate I added two peppermint shrimp. Sadly I was out of town for one weekend and had someone take care of my tank, when I came back one of my peppermints was gone! No trace of him, I looked under all the rock and couldn't find anything. I continued to test my water for ammonia and had no spikes so I thought maybe the hermits and other shrimp had eaten him :cry:.

Another two weeks past and my tank was 2 months old. My readings were 0 ammonia, 0 nitrite, and 15 nitrate so I decided to get a black ocellaris clown! During the following week I had a little ammonia .25, I figured this was just a mini cycle and continued with my 20% PWC every week. To my surprise the ammonia hasn't gone down, it's gone from .5 down to .25 and two weeks later is still at .3! My local fish store said that it was possibly due to overfeeding, but I feed the tank every other day with either some brine shrimp or some flakes and I am very careful with the amount I have been putting in. The clown isn't showing any signs of stress, but could it really be just a mini cycle?

Currently:
Ammonia- 0.3
Nitrite- 0
Nitrate- 15
pH- 8.2
Salinity- 1.023

Thanks in advance!!
 
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#4 ·
It shouldn't have a mini-cycle unless you added new live rock or something. Try removing the bio-balls. They don't belong in a saltwater tank anyways. The LR and LS take their place and bio-balls become nitrate factories, so it is possible that they're the cause of the ammonia.

14g is very small so you need to keep your bioload very small. 5 hermits seems like a lot (crabs produce poop too!) especially since you have a fish and shrimp in there too.

20 lbs of LS seems like a lot to me. Make sure you stir it up before doing WC and blow the gunk off the rocks with a turkey baster so you get the nasty stuff out of your tank.
 
#9 · (Edited)
Here we go again...the bio-ball police are out in force! Bio-balls are one of the best bio filters available. Bio balls DO NOT create nitrates, dirty bio balls do. As long as you have filter medium over the balls you are fine. I have a 55 gal. reef set up that I still use bio balls in, have used them for over 25 years. If there is ammonia it is because the "complete" cycle of 6-8 months is not through. Slow down, don't panic and allow the tank to go through the lengthy cycle period. Add some more live bacteria to help it along. Read here what WWM has to say on them;
http://www.wetwebmedia.com/bioballfaqs.htm
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#7 ·
Get rid of the bioballs, the soner the better. the longer you wait the harder to remove. some people put rock in that compartment. I would leave it empty. Makes cleaning your during water changes easier. Point a power head at the surface of the water. It may help with the ammonia.
 
#8 ·
I would take out the balls too....bare bones in there....then you can just siphon out the stuff that settles on the bottom. It will make for much easier cleaning. The extra stuff you get out will offset the loss of surface area for nitrifying bacteria I would think.
 
#12 ·
When my tank had it's diatom bloom they wouldn't go away so I decided to take a siphon to them, I think this led to a lot of them dying off in the tank. Hopefully this is the reason for the ammonia that is present, I'm going to try and remove as much as I can with my PWC.
 
#13 ·
Bio Balls do not create nitrate per se but they are very good at hosting the bacteria that break down ammonia and nitrite into nitrate. Without an anerobic area that other bacteria can break down the nitrate you will get accumulations of nitrate that are usually dealt with with water changes or adding macro algae to consume it.
I would suspect the test kit readings if you cannot find significant die off to account for the raised level.
 
#14 ·
ill throw my .02 in here and hope it helps. Ithe thing with bio balls, imo, is that maybe they work for some in some particular systems, but they are not necessary, so why use them? as doug1 suggested, the issue is about the different environments the types of bacteria we want to grow need.

the type of bacteria that convert ammonia to nitrite and nitrite to nitrate do their thing in the presence of o2. this is pretty much everywhere in the tank. the glass, the surface of the live rock, in any sort of mechanical filter, and on the surfaces of bio balls. the problem arises when you realize that nitrate is converted to n gas only in anoxic areas. these areas are basically found only in the deep pores of the live rock. as you can see, there is far more oxygenated area than anoxic. as doug1 suggested, this is why we do water changes to keep nitrates in check. so where mechanical filters and bio balls come in to play is that theu have plenty of oxygenated area but no anoxic. thus they are great at converting ammonia to nitrite and nitrite to nitrate but that's it. the better option, imo, it to let the detritus settle in a low flow area where it wont rot and you can siphon it out with a regular water change.

I don't look at bio balls as a "bad" thing, just unnecessary. my nitrates are between 5 and 10, and im using only live rock and a skimmer.

also, if you have any detectible ammonia in the tank, please return it to the store. any detectible ammonia is extremely hard on fish and may lead to permanent damage. if you are getting spikes of ammonia, something is not right with the tank or it is not ready for fish yet. were you feeding the tank during the cycling time? if the bacteria had nothing to eat, they may have all died off and when you put your fish in there was no bio filter to deal with the waste.

believe me, I know its difficult to look at an empty tank. I waited almost 4 months before adding my first fish.....lol
 
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